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THE THIRD CRITICAL WAR 

OF 

OUR NATIONAL HISTORY 



An address before the Ohio Commandery of the 

Military Order of the Loyal Legion 

of the United States, 

October 2, 1918. 



By COMPANION GEORGE A. THAYER, 

Late Captain of the Second Massachusetts 
Infantry Volunteers. 



PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDERY, 
Cincinnati, October. 1918. 



iLutlior 



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THE THIRD CRITICAL WAR OF 
OUR NATIONAL HISTORY. 



The Autumn days in which we of the ancient fellowship of 
the struggle of a half century ago for the integrity of the Amer- 
ican Union, assemble, after some months, for the renewal of our 
memories of that notable epoch in which it was our privilege to 
be actors, are invested with a profound solemnity under the 
shadow of a more tremendous war whose influences pervade 
every household, in one or another impressive form, spiritual 
or material, and constitute the predominant thought of every 
department of community interest and welfare; religion, litera- 
ture, education, industry, commerce. Wherever we turn we are 
confronted with the grim spectre of danger unto death of most 
that we hold precious; so that no other subject seems worthy 
of thought beside this mortal world tragedy in which, to the 
astonished unwillingness of many of us, our nation has gradually 
been made a partner. 

We have engaged, upon a portentous scale never before 
dreamed of, in a warfare for the maintenance of what we have 
slowly come to recognize as the same principle which drew our 
people into the two former great wars which constitute creative 
epochs of our history, and in setting forth the motives of our 
decision to bear a part in this world cataclysm, it seems to me 
profitable to indicate some of the connection of purpose and idea 
which makes today's contest an inevitable sequel and supplement 
of those two other uprisings of Americans. 

The war of 1775 to 83, of separation of the thirteen feeble 
colonies from the mother kingdom of Great Britain, what we 
know in popular parlance as the American Revolution, — settled 
the destiny of the colonies thenceforward as an independent self- 
governing nation, of which there was, before our accomplished 
fact, no other instance on this Western Continent; while the 

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struggle for the life of the Union of the then thirty-four states 
against those in our midst who would break it asunder, deter- 
mined that these United States should remain one and indivisible. 

In the first case the seven years of battle were the successful 
trial of a novel proposition in government ; viz. : that any intelli- 
gent body of people associated in a homogeneous community 
which had legitimate grievances against the government under 
which they had been born, have the right to set up a new system 
of laws and rulers in the place of the old system ; an audacious, 
revolutionary proposition, to the world of that century, which 
then as now if it failed to win was treason and folly ; if it suc- 
ceeded, established a new, hitherto unknown right in the civilized 
earth. We made a precedent which ever since its victory we 
have been ready to uphold against all adversaries. 

Every people which has the strength may make its own 
government in the face of all previous traditions ; a dangerous, 
pernicious pretension declared most of the old world rulers. 

The four years' war against the right of secession, besides 
that principle which chiefly engaged the two opposing armies, 
viz. : that the Union should be permanent and irrevocable or 
should be broken up at the caprice of any of its members, — in 
the eyes of the outside world, some of it friendly, a good deal 
of it hostile, constituted a test, as to whether or not a free 
government could withstand a severe assault of its enemies 
within as well as without. 

In the words of Abraham Lincoln who is, next to Franklin, 
our typical maker of political epigrams, the question was at 
stake "whether any government not too strong for the liberties 
of the people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in 
a great emergency." 

Mark the two steps of the argument: 

First. There can be such an institution as a well ordered 
self-governing republic. 

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Gift 



Second. That republic is capasble of withstanding the most 
violent assault from its own midst ; against divided counsels and 
convictions of its own citizens. 

The two facts were accomplished. Our fathers of the 18th 
century made a new type of nation so that, to any doubter if 
such a feat were possible the effective answer was : It has been 
done. 

And some eighty years later their descendants proved that 
this new type of sovereignty, founded upon the right of every 
citizen to have a part in its administration, could be as strong as 
any of the older types; much stronger we believe than any 
other form, however ancient. 

Now, half a century later, we have entered upon a third 
great war, whose distinction from the lesser intermediate con- 
tests which have enagaged our arms, is the purpose, in the words 
of our national spokesman. President Wilson, to vindicate for 
all mankind, for each and every group large enough to construct 
a workable system of law and order, — what we successfully 
demonstrated for our American people, viz. : the sacred right to 
choose its own form of government, with the additional assertion 
that no government can be permanent which does not ensure its 
subjects liberty to think, to grow, and to act in every field which 
does not trespass upon other persons' liberty. 

In 1775, when these colonies ventured to set up their own 
national housekeeping, every important sovereign in the world, — 
emperor, king, sultan, or whatever might be his title, denied that 
we or any other group under the sun were entitled to any part 
in the choice of the government set over them; rulers and poli- 
tical systems were given by God through a few special classes of 
men. That contempt of freedom in government has been steadily 
waning; yet it persists notably with one group of central Euro- 
pean nations, which we know as the German-Austrian alliance. 

These two leaders — Germany and Austria, — deny with 
scorn the pretension of common, untitled subjects, to have any 
control over national affairs. There is no sacred right of personal 

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political liberty. The only right is for nations to accept meekly 
the strong arm which keeps them in order; and for such strong 
governments to dominate any other people whose conquest seems 
desirable. And to enforce that pretension that might alone 
makes the right to subdue, to enslave, or exterminate the whole 
populated earth, the German empire through its sovereign, the 
Kaiser, its statesmen, its military leaders, and its scholars, en- 
tered upon a war for which, it is now established by overwhelm- 
ing evidence, it had been deliberately and elaborately preparing 
for some fifty years, first against one of its smallest neighbors, 
then against all its neighbors, with a ferocity, a defiance of all 
codes of morals, a cynical and brutal use of any instrumentality 
put into its hands by scientific progress, which has in the words 
of the President made it an outlaw in civilization against which 
every self-respecting nation must fight for its life. If that 
claim wins there is no law but brute might. The issue now seems 
simple ; but for a year or more it was not so clear. 

During the nearly 140 years of our national existence our 
government had studiously avoided any part in the wars of 
the old world, no matter how much the majority of our people 
might sympathize with one or another of the contestants. We 
took seriously to heart George Washington's counsel to avoid 
entangling foreign alliances. Seldom were those foreign policies 
such as concerned our country. But this time, after long, wily 
concealment of its aims the German empire threatened the right 
upon land and sea which we held to be the unalienable possession 
of mankind. Practically it brought the war to .our doors and 
made our interests and safety one with Europe. 

It assailed our American travellers upon the ocean, drown- 
ing them by the hundreds, and cynically announcing that they 
who did not wish a similar fate might stay at home. It captured 
our freight vessels and sunk or carried them to its own territory. 
It employed an army of spies in our own land to destroy property 
and life in the interest of its own war success. It deliberately 
intrigued with adjacent South American governments, notably 
with Mexico, to persuade them to wage war against us on our 

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own soil. And as Its Insanity Increased, for It speedily lost all 
respect for any established principles of morality or statecraft, its 
leaders of public opinion; clergymen, by the hundreds, scholars 
of world wide fame, writers of military treatises, as well as pro- 
fessional politicians, announced with an egotism which is so 
amazing as to seem the bluster of performers in opera bouffe, 
that America and Americans, like the rest of mankind, were 
their inferiors, who were destined straightway to be put into their 
proper servile place and take orders from their divinely ordained 
superiors. 

All these monstrous positions, although bluntly set forth in 
innumerable documents were so long concealed from the average 
person not conversant with literature or history or state discus- 
sion, that person whose chief reading is in newspaper headlines, 
that great numbers of our own citizens were unaware that any- 
thing out of the ordinary course of European wars had happened 
and refused to support any movement of resentment ; or any at- 
tempts at preparation for defense. 

It seems easy, for those to whom national action is as simple 
as the passage of a vote at a political convention whose proceed- 
ings are cut and dried, to go at once into warfare upon suspicion 
of danger. It was not easy to convince our majorities of the 
danger; and to engage in a war whose tremendous proportions 
are now just being revealed to all of us, but whose portentous 
possibilities were plain to the President and his counselors long 
before they were dreamed of by smart editors and ambitious 
office seekers, is an action from which responsible rulers might 
well shrink. But the time came a year ago, announced in the 
Presidents address of April 2, 1917, when there could be no 
longer hesitation; and the solemn sobering act has been entered 
upon. We are at war for the rights of democracy and humanity; 
against the most cruel, unscrupulous enemy that has entered the 
field of battle in modern centuries ; an enemy from whose methods 
of attack in the battle field, in the rear of the battle lines upon 
helpless age, womanhood and childhood, and in its prison camps, 
no device of torment or misery is withheld. 

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Already more than a million of our best manly strength is 
on the battle line to resist this adversary; and more millions are 
on the way. Our solemn task is assigned us and is accepted. 

I am persuaded that until the task is fully completed and 
our race freed entirely from the menace of a despotism which 
coming from the far past, reviving the temper of old centuries of 
tyranny, has learned nothing of what enlightened mankind has 
been thinking and gaining of its rights to life liberty and hap- 
piness in these last hundred years, there will be no retreat, no 
surrender. A high principled people cannot abandon at any brig- 
and's summons its right to live its own life, nor can it stand idly 
and stoHdly by and permit its fellow democracies elsewhere to 
be crushed. We are all, now, of one nationality, one hope, one 
political salvation. 

Let us not make light of the prospect before us. We are not 
entering upon a holiday pleasuring ; we have before us much sor- 
row, a large share in that distress which has clothed Europe and 
Asia with garments of tragedy, many grievous disappointments 
and failures of expectation. But to offset these we have such a 
unanimity of sentiment all over the land in accepting our great 
responsibility with whatever it may bring, as I think has never be- 
fore characterized our nation; such carefulness and thoroughness 
of preparation and such discipline and painstaking in the selec- 
tion of men in the ranks and in the leadership, as have never 
before been attempted by us; such skill and competency in the 
prevention of needless pain and the cure of wounds, as no nation 
hitherto has possessed; and, not least of all, such absence of 
mean, self-seeking motives of conquest, plunder, commercial jeal- 
ousy, and desire of any sort of victory than that which is good 
for all men of all generations to come, even for the people who 
are now our enemies^ as to constitute our part in the war as 
a far more genuinely holy war than all the expeditions of his- 
tory which have masqueraded under that title. 

And two important revelations of our national mission have 
come to us. 

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The first of these I may call home missionary duty; the 
second, foreign missionary duty ; using both terms, not in the old 
fashioned theological sense, but in the meaning of instructing the 
world here in our own land and wherever abroad our influence 
can reach, in what respects our existence as a free republic means 
a better world. 

Just as the preachers of Christianity in its various forms 
have announced with positiveness that they have glad tidings of 
great joy for all mankind; which it is their solemn obligation to 
proclaim wherever they can be heard; so it is forced upon us of 
this United States by the events of the last four years to take our 
political principles seriously, not as a mere accident whicTi befell 
us in a corner of the earth, which a few lucky Americans won by 
themselves, but as a divine trust, committed to us by the strug- 
gles and failures of many generations, and many races, to be used 
for the education of the old world across the sea as well as for 
this Western Continent. 

I. 

As to the home mission ; we have lately been awakened from 
a delusion and a torpor. A good many of us have taken it for 
granted that all of our population were loyal lovers of our repub- 
lic, prizing its principles and privileges above those of any other 
nation. And so assuming that there was nobody among us who 
did not heartily share that sentiment, we did practically nothing 
to encourage and develop it. We believed that it was a plant 
that would sow its own seeds to an ever increasing harvest. 

There has been very little education of the genuinely patrio- 
tic spirit, by which I mean, not the sort of noisy braggadocio to 
which has been satirically applied the term spread eagle talk, but 
a sober understanding of the features of our free government 
which command the honor of thoughtful students throughout the 
enlightened world, as one of the most hopeful and distinguished 
experiments in government which have ever been carried to such 
success. 



On national holidays when boasting was lawful such as any 
small boy may employ in speaking of his family affairs, we have 
talked loudly of national greatness. But we seldom meant it to 
be nor was it received by our hearers other than rhetorical flour- 
ish for temporary effect. Our public school instruction has not 
so far as I know, been directed towards emphasizing the obliga- 
tion of the citizen to the nation in any such degree as has been 
the foremost and incessant instruction of the arch mischief maker 
of this war. We have recited sounding orations of our great 
public speakers on festival days; but I question whether any set 
of pupils in school or college has been drilled in the superiority of 
democratic ideals to those of even the most effective monarchies, 
or could make a creditable presentation of reasons why this coun- 
try is the real type of the government, which the future genera- 
tions must prefer to every other sort. A majority among us, I 
fear would have given as the dominant reason why this is the 
most desirable nation for its citizens that material living was 
better here; we had more and fertile land, more enormous other 
resources of wealth and were less troubled in our personal con- 
venience by laws and police. 

Yet with this torpor concerning democratic ideals, there has 
been suddenly revealed to most of us, who were ignorant or in- 
different concerning the fact, that in many states of the Union 
there has been carried on at the public expense, in the schools 
which began the teaching of our children and continued it as far 
as most of them went in public instruction ; a systematic laudation 
of certain old world empires and their autocratic rulers, to the 
disparagement of our own national principles. 

America was spoken of with a certain contempt as far be- 
hind some European country, one especially, in its standards of 
intelligence, happiness or religion. And the impression was 
sought to be made that by comparison, a wise and autocratic king- 
dom with the lowest practicable participation of the individual, 
was a safer and stronger nation than a people of popular suffrage. 
The common schools were being made the tools for rehabilitating 

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antique and out of date theories of the divinity of hereditary 
rulers and nobihty. 

Of course the most of us of thinking abihty who have com- 
pared through personal experience and not by means of the safe 
distance of reading books, the blessings of imperial and republican 
political systems would take such praise of autocracy for its true 
worth or worthlessness, and continue to be grateful that we were 
free citizens of a self governing republic. 

For the most of our native stock, descended from settlers of 
two or three centuries, there would be no delusion about the 
divine rights of kings. And those children of recent immigrants 
who were driven from their old world home by tyranny, cruelty 
and insult, would still retain enough memory of the grievances of 
their fathers not to be duped by any appeal to ancestral sentimen- 
tahsm. 

But we have among us large numbers who are Americans 
chiefly for economic reasons, not for love of liberty nor because 
they intelligently understand the character of our government but 
because ours seems the land of promise for those who have been 
burdened by home poverty, or for such as would like to rise in 
the social scale and be as respectable as other people. They have 
looked upon America much as several generations all over the earth 
within the last century have looked upon the California, Aus- 
tralia, Alaska and South Africa gold fields, as a sort of No 
Man's Land where they could enter unhindered to make their 
fortune and carry it back to the fatherland. America had no 
particular demand upon them; it was an easy country to work; 
talents had their reward here as they could not in an over- 
crowded old world, but as for its institutions, its relative position 
with regard to universal justice and right, they had no opinion 
unless a contemptuous one. 

We are shaking off that insidious influence ; and one potent 
instrumentality has done far more than any other in our his- 
tory to remind all sorts of citizens, especially the rising youth, 
that ours is a true nation, demanding, and worthy to command, 

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the full reverence and loyalty of every soul upon its soil, not 
begging these citizens to think well of it but enjoining them, in 
the name of a social order which is superior to any individual 
right, to lay all that they are and all that they own at the feet 
of the goddess of American liberty, justice and law. That force 
is the creation of a democratic army by conscription. 

Many a family is today having a new birth of consecration 
to the sacred service of the republic; not so much because the 
elders of the family have of their own motion had a change of 
heart if they needed it, (some of these are suddenly getting under 
cover of the spirit of their children which they did not create or 
encourage;) but because the majesty of law has laid its behests 
upon their sons and brothers, and the instinct of romance and ad- 
venture in these young men has been aroused, to personify the 
nation as a noble austere mother, who has given them life and 
now asks them to repay, in part, the solemn debt. War service 
is creating what in our placid days we seldom undertook to incul- 
cate, in all ages and ranks of our citizenship, the deep conviction 
that nowhere else upon earth are there such privileges for the 
common person, of fair play, of respect for his personality with- 
out regard to his ancestry, of liberty for himself and his children 
to be and do their best, in mind and body; and from the waste 
of battle will emerge this strengthened republicanism which will 
allow no divided allegiance, no insolent assumption, founded upon 
traditional sentimentalism that somewhere else is a government 
superior to ours. We must make this the superior government if 
we find flaws in it, its weaknesses are not an essential part of it; 
it has the right to take the best it can find from any system, but 
these shall be no blind worship of foreign gods as superior be- 
cause they are foreign. 

II. 

And we are recognizing our foreign mission to demonstrate 
to reasonable peoples over the sea, the conviction that, in demo- 
cratic institutions is to be found the only sure protection of the 
dignity of human nature anywhere under the sun, the only guar- 
antee that can be trusted for meting equal justice to every soul 

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of man, that free government is the only surely good government, 
the only law under which the future man can attain the full stat- 
ure of his promise and potency, as a son of the Most High God. 

President Wilson's epigram that we must make the world 
safe for democracy means that the old, age long struggle, which 
created faint dawnings of political liberty in ancient times; but 
which has had some of its most dramatic manifestations within 
a hundred and fifty years, when our republic was born and the 
French republic tried to be born, and other lesser peoples have 
rebelled against despots, is still to be carried on after this war 
by the masses of plain people; against the decrepit advocates of 
government of the strong arm, or iron and blood, and we are on 
the side of the plain people M'ith all our resources. 

We do not intend to force any nation to accept our political 
ideas; but we demand a fair hearing of the merits of popular 
institutions by the side of monarchical institutions, with an op- 
portunity of free discussion and free choice of those who are to 
be governed. And that is the underlying purpose of our despatch 
of a host of strong men to the battle lines of Central Europe. We 
see who are friendly to our ideas and who are in implacable hos- 
tility to them ; and we are ready and glad to argue our cause 
against all adversaries in the field of deadly combat; and may 
God defend the right! 

And that a multitude of the brave and wise in the old world 
recognize our American championship of their dearest hopes and 
most cherished aspirations is evidenced by the growing weight 
which the messages of President Wilson are having with the 
public sentiment of our allied nations and with the statesmen who 
are forming the present policies of the war and looking to the 
safe solution of state problems when the war has come to its 
end. America is obtaining an influence among thoughtful and 
large minded men and women which it never before possessed ; 
and which it behoves us, who hold its reputation dear to support 
and depend by our words, our soberest thinking and our most 
willing sacrifices. 

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And it is not the great and famous of Europe chiefly that we 
are making our friends and lovers. That long standing estimate 
of the rank and file of common people of Europe, not of the rich 
and powerful but of the poor and oppressed that our country was 
the refuge and salvation of all such as they, against the wicked 
and lawless, has today new and pathetic revival ; our troops are 
their dreams become realities, their deliverers from the intolerable 
sorrows which burden them ; and the tramp of our armed republi- 
cans is the voice of heaven, at last, long delayed, but now made 
real, in answer to their prayers that they may be redeemed from 
their body of death. 

One effective utterance of this trust that God has not de- 
serted His innocent children came in a short cable message some 
months ago from Paris, to the purport that the first representa- 
tives of our Republican van guard of soldiers were touched and 
astonished to see among the spectators of their passage, little chil- 
dren upon their knees in the street. The spirit of that display 
of childlike faith has been admirably embodied in a simple poem 
in which in dramatic form the children and mothers of Europe 
speak for the democracy of Europe, the latent but prophetic 
democracy. 



"Why so patient standing there? 

Edouard and small Pierre, 

Georges, Yvette and Marie Claire?" 

When the troops come marching by 

(Quoth the small Pierre) 
Mother wilt thou lift me high, 
That we see them, thou and I? 

Mother, are they fair to see ? 

(A busy tongue, Pierre!) 
Have they little boys like me, 
Left at home across the sea? 

(Alas, alas, Pierre!) 

Mother we have waited long, 

(Long indeed, Pierre.) 
The sun has grown so hot and strong, 
Surely none has done them wrong! 

(God forbid. Pierre!) 



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Mother who did send them here? 

(The gift of God, Pierre.) 
But then there is no need of fear, — 
And on thy cheek I see a tear, 

(The tears of hope, Pierre.) 

Down the boulevard a cry; 

A bugle note is flung on high. 

The stars and stripes are passing by ! 

The gift of God, quoth small Pierre; 
His hat on breast, his curls all bare, 
He knelt upon the pavement there. 

Five young children kneeling there, 
Georges, Yvette and Marie Claire, 
Edouard and small Pierre. 

Fairest flag of liberty 
Carrying hope across the sea, — 
A little child has hallowed thee. 
And made of these a prayer. 



IN THE MIDST OF THEM. 

Margaret Bell Merrill. Scribner's, May, 1918. 

Cablegram from Paris: "The Americans were greatly sur- 
prised to see a number of children kneeling in the street as the 
flag was carried by. 



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